156. FAMILY FURNITURE
A.R. Gurney, whose work in recent years
has been a mainstay at the Flea Theatre, returns with FAMILY FURNITURE, yet
another in his chronicles of WASP family life. The family here lives in Buffalo,
a favorite Gurney locale (he was raised there), the time is the summer of 1952, and
the seams between conservative WASP values and those of the postwar generation
are beginning to fray. There is nothing earthshaking in this quiet picture of
family life, and we’ve seen it all before, but Gurney’s low-key, naturalistic
style and the nicely complementary approach of the actors under Thomas Kail’s
unobtrusive direction keep the piece afloat for its intermissionless 90
minutes.
Peter Scolari (left) and Andrew Keenan-Bolger. Photo: Joan Marcus.
Peter
Scolari, channeling the simple underplaying of his former “Bosom Buddies”
costar, Tom Hanks, is Russell, the well-off father of college students Peggy
(Ismenia Mendes), a Smith student, and Nick (Andrew Keenan-Bolger), who's at Williams. The family is spending the
summer at their lakefront home on Lake Erie, where Russell likes to fish and
sail. Peggy has an Italian-American boyfriend, Marco, but Russell, despite his professed
love of the Italian people when they’re in their homeland, has
reservations about them in America, where he thinks of them as being either gangsters or politicians: "they misbehave when they're away from their roots." He reveals his own youthful love affair with a Jewish girl, which he thinks amply demonstrates why alliances with people from other family backgrounds are unwise. He allows Peggy to go on a month-long trip
to Italy, hoping it will be the antidote to Marco, and is thrilled when she
comes home having met and possibly fallen for a wealthy, dyed-in-the-wool WASP boy
from Philadelphia named Hamilton Booth who goes to Princeton. Russell’s sense of vindication is swiftly altered when
Peggy reveals she may be pregnant by him. Suddenly, “Princeton,” as the smugly
upper-crust Russell calls him, is a “rascal” who will pay for whatever expenses
are incurred. The idea of “abortion” is only indirectly suggested. Meanwhile,
Nick is in love with a Jewish girl, Betsy (Molly Nordin), a Bennington student
of poetry. Russell once again expresses his unease about such a cross-ethnic relationship. Gurney delicately navigates Russell’s
them versus
us mentality in a way that shows it as more than simple bigotry. Although far less common now than then, we all know families that object to their children marrying outside their ethnicities.
The central plot device is Nick's suspicion that his mother, the attractive Claire (Carolyn
McCormick), is having an affair
with Howard Baldwin, a family friend. Unlike the uptight Russell, Claire has more liberal ideas about human relationships ("I believe in hybrid vigor"), so it's not unlikely that something is, indeed, going on. Betsy, Nick’s girlfriend, even plots to
have him and her read aloud the closet scene from HAMLET in front of Claire to
gauge her reaction as a way of testing her guilt. Claire's behavior profoundly affects Nick, whose summer ends with him having moved a step forward toward maturity.
In
this cultured world of privilege and ease, tennis and martinis, people rarely
raise their voices. An undercurrent of polite repression races through everyone's veins, an attitude expressed in Russell’s insistence on the proper use
of English. The actors convincingly capture through timing and emphasis many of
the subtextual nuances, and they capably express both the humorous and poignant
elements. Rachel Hauck’s setting, too, is tastefully spare but nuanced, being
merely three large, white-painted windows and sets of shutters along the rear
wall, abetted by some basic wooden benches and a chair that serve for whatever
furniture is needed, and can even be rearranged even to imply the presence of a
sailboat. The play begins with the opening of the shutters for the summer season,
and concludes with their being shut. Filling the brief interstices between the
scenes is Bart Fasbender’s sound design of snatches of pop music from the
period.
FAMILY
FURNITURE has many conventional elements. It doesn’t explore new ground, its
plot is familiar, its performances are un-showy. But it has a fundamental level
of sincerity that makes it more than it at first appears.
